Fostering Trust at UCLA: Insights into its Data Analytics Governance Strategy

We had the pleasure of talking to one of our customers, UCLA, during Tableau Conference 2024 about the importance of trust in data analytics. Don Collins, Senior BI Administrator at UCLA, accepted to share his thoughts on the growing importance of analytics governance within the organization and its role in fostering trust in the decision-making process.

Working in the central department for all analytics knowledge, Don has seen the growing importance of analytics governance within the organization. As their data environment matures, he has seen an increase in the volume of users taking advantage of self-service analytics platforms. Due to this, getting insights into these environments has become critical to know what’s going on behind the scenes.

“Without getting insights into your environment, you’re not really sure what’s going on under the hood…there’s a risk involved there. And then it really boils down to data quality, which translates to trust. So if we don’t have trust, we pretty much have failed.”

With this growing need to have quality data and thus trust, Don emphasized how testing their dashboards and reports is so important. In a previous world of testing, his team would carry out testing whenever there was an upgrade or a new release of a workbook, in other words, at ad hoc events, but what really needs to be done now is testing on a weekly, even daily basis.

“It doesn’t do us any good to know that our latest workbook has, you know, not changed in five months if the underlying data that it’s supposed to be presenting has failed at some point.”

The complexity of their data behind the dashboards and reports is increasing and they need to make sure the content they’re delivering is accurate and recent.

UCLA leverages Wiiisdom solutions to ensure its reports and dashboards are constantly reliable and up-to-date to build and maintain trust in its data analytics. If you want to discover more about how to build trust through automated testing for your BI content, please reach out to us!